Face to Face with Kaiserism

by James W. Gerard

Europe is in the position of a wanderer who has gone astray into a swamp. In vain he labours to regain firm ground. The more frantically he struggles the surer he is to become submerged. Like an infant child he is unable to help himself. Help must come from people outside the swamp.

We are now in the third year of the biggest, the most fratricidal and the most hopeless war the world has ever seen. It is hopeless in so far as on the one side none of the two coalitions is likely to be in a visible time as much the victor over the other that it can dictate it its own terms, and as on the other side there is no common basis to be seen for a sensible compromise. It is not the extravagance of demands that forms an insuperable barrier for peace. Extravagant terms of peace have indeed been formulated by unauthorised persons or groups but they have nowhere received the sanctioning stamp of the responsible governments. The latter prefer rather to shine by the moderation of their demands, at least as far as territory is concerned. But it is just this apparent moderation that makes peace such an almost insoluble problem.

Far behind this moderation in regard to territorial demands looms the desire to destroy the opponents' chances of political predominance. The war is, for the present at least, in the first instance a struggle about the supremacy in Europe. And this perhaps more in a negative sense than otherwise. Jingoes are, of course, everywhere in high and low quarters, but it is very doubtful whether one of the responsible heads of the belligerent nations pursues for himself or his nation seriously and consistently what might be called the mastery of Europe. All are, however, dead against the idea that this mastery might pass into the other camp. Comparatively easy as it is to settle a dispute on questions of territory by arbitration or to work out schemes for compromise in regard to such, so difficult or almost impossible it would be to arbitrate on a question of actual supremacy or to settle it by compromise.

Particularly in the camp of the Allies is the possibility lest Germany might emerge out of the war the actual arbiter of Europe conceived as an unbearable thought. None of the allied Powers, neither England nor France and not even Russia, Italy being in this respect quite out of question, has during the last decades shown a disposition or a pretence to play up to such a part.

But Germany is suspected of nourishing ideas of this kind, and utterances of some of their prominent men, occasional sayings of the Kaiser included, tend to give substance to this suspicion. In vain Germans object that their country has all the 44 years since 1870 kept the peace in Europe. We have done the same, would the others reply, and we have not, as Germany has done, again and again threatened war when things did not run according to her wishes or humours. Germany has in fact abstained from actual peace breaking. But she was regarded and has not a little done to acquire the fame, as the latent or virtual disturbing element in European politics.

This view in regard to political Germany has greatly been enhanced through many of her actions during the present war. It is natural enough, though not particularly edifying, that in a war each party ascribes all the guilt thereof to the opponents and poses as the innocent who maliciously was surprised when not dreaming of any harm. But the cantankerous way in which almost the whole political and intellectual Germany has handled this question and has treated it as a crime not to take in every respect the German view of the case and of all the details of warfare has strengthened the feeling that this nation has come to regard itself as a sort of high judge of Europe. People were reminded of that ill-considered harangue to German soldiers at the time of the China expedition when they were entreated to act towards the Chinese like the Huns under Attila. This and the eagerness to crush by overwhelming power every small nation that ventures to take sides with the Allies as well as the proclaiming of rights for submarines and Zeppelins upon her own authority—these and similar measures have only been too suited to nourish the conception that Germany places herself in the rôle of the scourge of God.

How this feeling reacts upon political thought is illustrated by a conversation a German socialist has had in the summer of 1915 on neutral ground with a French socialist politician of no jingoish leanings at all on the possibilities of peace. Even if Germany declared herself ready to relinquish Belgium and to return to France every inch of ground occupied, his countrymen would not accept peace from her, explained the Frenchman. And on the question, "Why not?" he replied passionately: "Because it would be the German peace; because it would yet leave Germany the all powerful of Europe; because it would make us depend upon the whims and tempers of that conceited military nation."

"But are you going to bleed yourself to death?" was the next question, and the reply, uttered in a voice where sadness mingled with determination, was:

"Yes, rather be ruined!"

This is a specimen of the feeling created by the present war, and I am afraid the sentiment has not abated a whit yet. Germans have done a good deal in attempts to detach the French from the English. They have told them that they are only the poor seduced tools of the base and egotistic Britishers, that Germans did not bear them any malice, that they rather pitied them and would fain be ready to come to terms with them. But declarations of this sort proved only how little the French mentality was understood this side of the Vosges. The French nation is too much impressed by the memory of her great past and the part played by her in European politics to stand being pitied and patted like children of tender age. It will be respected as an equal who acts with the full knowledge of the state of things and is too much given to political reflection to accept willingly any view of the war that visibly is coloured by the interest of Germany in the dissension between the two great Powers of Western Europe. The anti-German feeling runs still very high in France; her leading papers excel without any exception in extremely harsh language against everything German, and the great mass of those who in former years had propagated the idea of a Franco-German understanding are now dead against it.